2023 Review

I’m doing this now because I don’t think I’ll be posting anything new that will add to my word count, so here are my AO3 stats for 2023:

Compared to 2022:

The most notable difference is the word count: I’ve surpassed my word count last year with an additional 5k! 12k of the total is from my ongoing fic, Collusion, which I’ve published 4 chapter updates for this year.

I’ve uploaded 9 fics this year, including the chapter updates. Two of those are from a new fandom, Baldur’s Gate 3! The tadpole brainrot got to me, friends. But it was glorious. There’s so much character and story to explore here and I can’t wait to write more for this game!

On another note, I planned on participating in NaNoWriMo this year. I even had an outline and everything… until I decided not to follow that outline and instead write a different thing because that’s what I was inspired to write for. Needless to say, I couldn’t keep up with it due to the lack of outline, and also due to me being away for the last week of November. In the end, I wrote a total of 9,342 words; part of it is for a zine but most of it is for a multi-chapter Baldur’s Gate 3 fic that I have not uploaded yet.

I’ve definitely learned not to post anything multi-chapter too early, especially with the rewrites I’ve done for said BG3 fic. And with past experiences of wanting to retcon something and almost writing myself into a corner… well. I need to exercise more patience methinks.

One thing I’ve done to mitigate my excitement with publishing too early is by posting WIPs online. I get the dopamine, feedback, and I can freely change things later since it’s not the final product yet (and I do try not to post the really good stuff—mostly because the build-up is way too long and I might as well post the entire thing at that point).

It’s definitely harder to be more patient for longer fics, like Collusion. I don’t think I’ll have the patience to wait until posting a potentially 50k-word fic like that… but who knows. Since I’ve started doing this, maaaybe I can slowly go for longer.

All in all, I’m satisfied with the progress I’ve made this year. I wish I could’ve done more, but I think that can be said for everything I did this year. (Not in the self-depecrating way, but in an ambitiously arrogant way. Ha.)

For next year, I’d like to keep it up: write around ~25k words or more, and possibly more frequent updates on Collusion and join more zines! Yay!